National Prayer Breakfast wars: Did President Trump mean to reject words of Jesus?

Few politicos at the National Prayer Breakfast were shocked when President Donald Trump brandished copies of The Washington Post and USA Today to celebrate their "ACQUITTED" headlines.

But it was a Harvard University professor who did something even more provocative -- quoting strong words from Jesus of Nazareth -- during an event known for its meek Godtalk and vague calls for unity.

America's "biggest crisis," said Arthur Brooks of the Kennedy School of Government, is a culture of contempt that is "tearing our society apart."

"I want to turn to the words of the ultimate original thinker, history's greatest social entrepreneur, and as a Catholic, my personal Lord and Savior, Jesus," said Brooks, author of books such as "The Conservative Heart" and "Love Your Enemies." He is the former leader of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The key passage for this era, he said, is found in Gospel of Saint Matthew, chapter 5, verses 43-45: "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."

Brooks added: "Love your enemies! Now that is thinking differently. It changed the world starting 2,000 years ago, and it is as subversive and counterintuitive today as it was then. But the devil's in the details. How do we do it in a country and world roiled by political hatred and differences that we can't seem to bridge?"

Trump declined to take part when Brooks challenged prayer-breakfast participants to raise their hand if they loved someone who disagreed with them about politics.

As the next speaker, the president responded to Brook's remarks with words that unleashed a week of online debate among conservative religious believers -- early Trump supporters and reluctant Trump supporters alike -- who have debated the degree to which they can embrace his take-no-prisoners approach to national leadership.

The activists at ChurchClarity.org are back, with another narrow, but important, set of numbers detailing what some strategic American churches are, and are not, saying about LGBTQ issues and other causes that are crucial to the Christian left.

Anyone who cares about the development of an open, candid, evangelical left has to be paying close attention to this project. That means bookmarking two essential websites -- ChurchClarity.org itself and the Religion News Service columns of Jonathan Merritt, the scribe who has done the most to provoke and define debates on the evangelical left on these topics.

The goal of the project, simply stated, is to examine the public statements of various churches -- symbolized by doctrinal documents on websites -- in order to determine where the leaders of these congregations stand on LGBTQ issues.

While some may see the project as hostile to Christian orthodoxy, the bottom line is that it's offering newsworthy material that reporters need to know about. It is also providing links to its source materials. Journalists can respect that (as demonstrated by this Rod Dreher post reacting to these surveys).

The bottom line: Reporters can use ChurchClarity.org as a key voice in an important debate.

That is, journalists can choose to do that. It appears that some will settle for a public-relations approach. For example, see the Newsweek piece with this headline: "AMERICA’S LARGEST CHURCHES ARE ALL ANTI-LGBT AND LED BY MOSTLY WHITE MEN." Yes, the all-caps thing appears to be Newsweek style. Here is the overture:

None of America’s 100 largest churches are LGBT-affirming and almost all of them are led by white men, according to ChurchClarity.org, an organization that reports churches’ LGBT policies and rates congregations based on their level of clarity.